Empower Merchandisers to Make the Most of the Customer Experience

How can companies differentiate from the thousands of ecommerce sites available at a customer’s fingertips? Merchandisers must be empowered to create excellent customer experiences that delight their consumers from the start of their shopping journey. Here are some simple tips on how they can do it and how an organization can ensure they’re supported.

Create Tighter Alignment with SEO Strategies

Any web page can be a landing page. With the help of SEO tactics and ad campaigns, landing pages can vary from product detail pages, category spotlights, or search results pages. To drive more organic traffic to your site, merchandisers need just as much control over their page’s metadata as their product catalogs.

Granting merchandisers access to a page’s metadata allows them to incorporate SEO terms or phrases into a page’s title, description, and URL. Merchandisers can create specific landing pages around targeted ad campaigns and long-tailed searches to drive organic traffic with this ability. Tools, such as hierarchical facets, should be used to increase conversion rates by directing shoppers to curated results pages that use facets to specify results and leave “breadcrumbs” to help consumers drill up and down through available options.

This tactic has compounding benefits as it allows merchandisers to adapt to social trends, improve SEO rankings, and expand reach through long-tailed searches.

Use Page Zones to Convey a Story

Wherever your shopper lands, that page must be relevant to their intent. Using page zones is an effective method to support the primary content on the home page. Filling page zones with rich content, faceted results, recommendations, products, or category spotlights increases the likelihood of getting shoppers to engage with your landing pages.

How zones are arranged and used varies based on the page type. For example, a category page may use eye-catching banners to capture visitors’ attention, followed by category.

In contrast, a search results page would show relevant item results and search facets, including available sizes and colors.

For the best results, work off of a user-configurable template—don’t start from ground zero. You can save time and reduce work by adding customizations to a blank template and rearranging zones to draw a shopper’s attention to specific areas.

Show More and Do Less with AI-Powered Product Discovery

A shopper’s attention span is short. Instead of putting more work on the customer, integrate pages with AI-powered search and signal-driven recommendations to showcase more products in a catalog and delight visitors browsing for the next product to fall in love with.

Merchandisers can use page zones to showcase high-performing, trending, or items bought together to influence higher AOV metrics. Integrating pages with an AI-powered solution that powers semantic vector search helps update supply and inventory data to your pages in real-time. Whenever a product is low or out-of-stock, an AI-powered search solution would identify that product ID and replace it with similar, high-performing items on the page that are available for purchase.

Too Long, Didn’t Read

To update a series of pages quickly against trending signals during the busy holiday shopping seasons, merchandisers need to streamline page creation and modification across their website at scale.

To do this, merchandisers should prioritize the following:

1. Control page metadata to improve SEO rankings.
2. Utilize page zones to increase engagement.
3. Embed AI-powered semantic vector search to alleviate merchandiser workload and increase shopper AOV.
4. Take advantage of signal-driven recommendations that will automatically update based on intent.

Lucidworks’ commerce solutions empower merchandisers by offering them more control over pages across their site at scale with user-configurable page templates. Allow your merchandisers to create and edit page types, align page metadata with SEO terms, arrange page layouts, embed AI-powered search to page zones, and more from an intuitive user interface. It’s time to break the habits of your old search workflows. Learn more about how Lucidworks’ commerce solutions can help your merchandisers today.